Intellectual property law is good. Excess in intellectual property law is not. This blog is about excess in Canadian and international copyright law, trademarks law and patent law. I practice IP law with Macera & Jarzyna, LLP in Ottawa, Canada. I've also been in government and academe. My views are purely personal and don't necessarily reflect those of my firm or any of its clients. Nothing on this blog should be taken as legal advice.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

No - Dewey did NOT defeat Truman and Obama did NOT lose the Supreme Court health care case....

I guess that CNN and Fox News must have been using the same headline writers and analysts who wrote the above stuff in 1948 and who probably should have retired by now.

Here were some of the blunders this morning as reported by the Washington Post, some of which I watched with amusement and a shameful touch of schadenfreude concerningthose who doubt the value of hard working slow and steady legal bloggers who are sometimes not quite first to post but who who may actually get things right:

CNN’s screen read: “Supreme Ct. Kills Individual Mandate.” “The court striking down that mandate is a dramatic blow to the president,” said John King, CNN reporter.The network also sent an email reporting that the mandate had been struck down and posted the news on Twitter.By 10:13 a.m., some doubt had seeped in and the onscreen headline read: “Supreme Court Rules on Obama Law.”
“Let’s take a deep breath and see what the justices actually decided,”
Blitzer said. “It could be more complicated than we originally thought.”By
10:15, the network was reporting that the entire law had been upheld,
and King called it “a huge, huge victory for President Obama.”Fox
made the same initial mistake, with Bill Hemmer touting the “breaking
news” that the individual mandate had been declared unconstitutional.
Fox anchor Bret Baier tweeted the same news. Within two minutes,
however, Megyn Kelly was citing the SCOTUSblog in casting doubt on that
interpretation, even ordering producers to change an onscreen headline
that read: “Supreme Court Finds Health Care Individual Mandate
Unconstitutional.” “We’re trying to do the best we can,” Hemmer said.

Anyway, all's well that ends well - and anyone who was smart enough to watch this on the SCOTUS Bloggot accurate insight almost immediately.

It's not a good idea to rush to judgment until one reads the judgment.

Any, any honest lawyer will be quick to admit that it's not always easy to figure out who wins and loses in some complicated appellate decisions.

It should be interesting when we get perhaps five judgments all at once from Canada's copyright pentaology.

Anyway, I congratulate our American friends at the dawning of a new era where everyone can actually be entitled to reasonable health care. Canada has survived under such a system for many decades. You will too.